Of Narcissus
by pulsatingcreature
Summary: The birth of Narcissus was not so much an escape from the slick warmth of his mother's womb as it was a condemnation.
1. I

_AN: Newest story :) Was actually written and submitted for an inkpop contest, so if you can read and vote for me that would be super appreciated! Time is running out though... /contests/2/forbidden-love-the-poison-diaries-writing-contest/entry/1643/_

_Hope that you all enjoy; it is the first time I've ever written anything about Greek Mythology and I hope I don't do it a diservice._

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__The birth of Narcissus was not so much an escape from the slick warmth of his mother's womb as it was a condemnation. Narcissus: the result of seduction and trickery - by the gods of course, the Greeks would never allow the offspring of mere mortals such poetic misery - and the weak heart of a woman too ensnared by emotion to deny him. His beauty rivaled that of Aphrodite herself and he caught the lustful, needy eyes of many women and men. His history was his curse though, for it had been prophesied that if he were to ever know himself that he would join the sad souls of those who had expired before him. Of course, his beauty bred vanity, and in turn inspired an arrogant attitude which did not go unnoticed by the gods. When he spurned the affections of the nymph Echo (or those of his lover Ameinias – the details had been twisted and transfigured by the minds and tongues of men, altered until it suited their needs), Nemesis, the goddess of redemption and revenge, damned him with the past the prophets foresaw and cursed him to fall in love with his reflection glaring back from the home of his father. He sat by the edge of the river, desperate, oh so desperate to embrace the man below him until he withered away from thirst and hunger and a longing for something unattainable. From the ground where he sat in his distress sprung a flower of plain white, pure and simplistic in its natural beauty._

When the child is born he smells of jasmine and hyacinth and the dark, rich aroma of leaves curled, dead on the forest floor. A prophet smiles and loosens his tongue to sing the song of the condemned.


	2. II

Even as a child they can see it: echoed back at them from the yawning depths of his eyes, pupils large and black as chunks of coal. It lies on the skin of his blooming lips, blood swelling against the thin flesh and, if they lean in close enough, they can smell a dead, archaic history on his sweet breath - blood and ruin and blood and war. A time of innovation and comfortable superstition that sat in their minds, heavy and black like a fistful of mercury.

His existence is an anachronism and the universe presses on him, presses him back into the soil where he had died and was reborn. But that is not his story and his rebellion is the strong beating of his heart and the sheen of sweat on his brow as his back bends with the weight of time and myths and the silly wishes of a forest nymph.

He leans in and whispers stories into their waiting ears: tales of angry gods and men turned to swine and the story of his birth, only it is not his - not this time. They listen as his voice awakens something ancient in them, something lying right at their core; a fear which unravels from their souls like the sour peel of a lemon and they want to beg him to stop, but they yearn for this. Instead they say _please, god please_ because this is something they can understand at that baser part of them that had been buried far, far away - the crumbling of empires, the broken heart of a spurned lover, a jealously which grows in the chest like the stretched latex of an inflated balloon.

As he grows older, his stories grow with him and become monsters: immense and terrifying, yet luring them closer until they find themselves at his feet when he breathes the final syllable slowly, savoring the light taste of it on his tongue. When they rise, they leave behind the still bleeding corpses of beasts, the blood pooling and slipping through the wooden panels of the floor. He looks down at his reflection in the still warm fluid; it is browned and distorted like ink staining gravel pillars, but he can see himself, if only faintly. The pyre they constructed in his living room snaps and pops as wood gives way and bows before him as well. He walks to the window on the other side of the room and screams his name into the sky. It pulses quickly and shatters, dark clouds which had fleeced the sky giving way to a blue Grecian sky. He laughs as the gods bellow in return, only the name is wrong and the elastic sky snaps back, having been pulled back too tightly with his bravado. He does not belong here and the man they want is lying below his skin, stuffed into his body until their hearts joined and beat in a singular rhythm, but there is only room for one.

His mother runs into the room and seizes his arm. The veins strain against his skin, his pulse beating wildly with exhilaration and pride and they watch as the blood which flows through them slowly turn from blue to the violent green hue of chlorophyll. The next morning, he discovers the animals burning in the back yard and the mirrors in the house gone.


	3. III

He is beautiful, this is obvious. His face is round like the full face of the moon and his cheekbones, sharp and reminiscent of dead royalty sit below thin eyebrows, raised slightly too high to be considered polite, but they do not chastise him - for this is what they have created. Their words of praise and admiration have planted in him the seeds of arrogance and he has tended this garden lovingly, until Vanity, like the thin fingers of death, embraced his heart like a lover and crept still to settle as a twinkle in his gaping eyes.

He recounts the adventures of Jason, the labors of Hercules and when he finishes they rise and leave him sacrifices, their backs bent in worship until their noses touch the ground. The universe still crushes down on him _he does not belong here the twist of his lips and his back breaking under centuries since he last walked the land of mortal men _and forces him to bow back slightly, his anger palpable as the air becomes thick and it forces the occupants in the room to their knees as they struggle to breathe. This is his revenge.

Some times a young woman or man will linger after he dismisses his audience with a slight motion of his hand. His narcissism clings to him like a coat and the man occupying his skin smirks as the youth steps forward, hesitating when his eyes, bright like the sun kissing ice, flick to the approaching body before looking longingly out the window where the sky is dark and closed and wire-thin. They settle on the arm of his chair and guide his face to their own with the unbearably soft pads of their fingers. He looks into their eyes and sees his own image reflected back. When the young woman – or man, he cares not for gender for he only ever sees himself shining back in their anxious faces – kisses him he allows it, but as her eyes close shut he forces them back open with a sharp nip at the plump flesh of her bottom lip. A hand rests on his clothed thigh and he shoves _her him her_ harshly to the ground. His mouth is an angry red gash resting on the bottom half of his face and he smiles down at the person laying on the ground, his teeth made of the same polished white stone that had covered the pyramids before they were stripped bare, greed and the weakening of an empire leaving them with nothing but block baked by the Egyptian sun.

He leans down and grabs the front of their shirt, "wrong history, but at least it's not his." He smells of jasmine and blood and the clean scent of green leaves dying on the forest floor. She whispers _his_ name, and he snarls. Somewhere, in the corner of a brain that is not his, a voice echos back, "Narcissus."


	4. IV

There were more of them now and they crowded into the living room, out the door until they were spilling into the hall. They pressed their ears to the wall to catch his voice, paint and sweat bonding until they melt into the structure and shout his metaphors back to him. The blind reverence has coaxed the twinkle in his eyes to shine brighter, brighter until it has changed them from black to the mossy green of a river bed.

He is constructed of grand pillars, touching the clouds while below him sprawling plains are baked soft, shaped and folded by his artisan hands. He teases the dough of the world until it is something _he_ remembers, something _he _can understand in the empty marrow of his bones, the sounds of religious chanting and wild boars squealing as there are stuck again, again by his spears. It pours from his bones and into his blood, circulating about his body with a harsh, filling passion _the river god, Cephissus, trapping and seducing the nymph, Leriope, and that is how his story begins _that has been retold in a million myths, and will be told in a million more. But he is not a myth. When the poisonous cadence of Narcissus's honeysuckle voice blooms in the _slick warmth _of his throat he swallows deeply, willing the flaxen hue of his hair to return to the darkness of his birth.

His mother catches him laying in the cool soil in the backyard, the curse of a universe that is not fully his weighing down _he sat, sinew and illuminating flaxen hair rising again as the petals of a mere flower _and beckoning him back into the soil marked with the runes of resurrection in a tongue that he did not know, but that lived in the very meat of him; _him_. Time has etched itself in her face and he can see none of himself in his mother, not anymore. His hand is a caress on her stomach as he wills her blood to break past the flesh. The minute sound of a cocoon forced open and his lips, dagger-thin and tasting of conquest, snarl when the grass is stained red - the blood of a beast.

_She called to the seers and they called back – his history was his curse. _The open mouths of prophets, wide and massive and naked as a gash in the earth. They recount the stories of Narcissus, _his past. _Of arrogance and indifference that settles on his brow like the jewel of a crown; a spurned nymph and a voice whispering back from the empty spaces between breaths; a man who knew himself and suffered for this. He was born from a loveless union – the gods were in love with Love, but the bows of Eros were never coated with the gold stain of ichor; thus it was the mortals who must take on the heart of it - and was never gifted with the ability to feel such things. The boy listens to them and his eyebrows sit on his face a fraction too high.

_His beauty was an ugly scar and it seared his image into the vitreous gel of their eyes until _all he saw reflected back was his own image. Their warnings roll off him like a cool stream of water and his laugh is that of rain, beating down on them with a cruel rhythm. The gods are long dead, the last of them replaced by a man with tanned skin and a promise of salvation. The thin lines under the eyes of the prophets are full of dust and spices. When he strikes with serpentine quickness and harshly kisses the nearest one, he forces their eyes open with harsh nips and whispers in a language branded into the very meat of him. His image has been branded into the whites of their eyes, so when he reaches out to kiss one of them, _Narcissus urges their eyes open and stares into his own reflection. _


	5. V

They do not converse often. The boy is staring at his distorted image in the concave face of a spoon when he hears the voice that has burrowed itself in the back of his head. _He_ speaks with slow confidence, and each word is satin-soft in his ear.

"_They do not look kindly down on you, young one. It is forbidden to worship oneself with the same reverence paid to the gods. Only in my final moments did I learn that," Narcissus says, _and the boy can imagine that if the man possessed a body that he would be laying cat-like and lazy in the fading embers of the day.

"I am not you," the boy remarks snidely as he continues to preen. His blonde hair falls over his face like slanted sunlight and he cannot remember it being any color other than this. He is older, but one could not tell by looking at him – time sits looking up at him with the half-lidded eyes of a lover, caressing him gently before smoothing the lines forming on his face with a careful hand.

"_Not yet, but too soon our minds shall merge completely, just as our hearts have. Your history is mine-."_

"I have no history, only experience. It is not I who is dead, Narcissus," the corners of his mouth lift into a facsimile of a smile, but one would not dare call it such.

"_Not yet, not yet" Narcissus hums, voice cold like morning's first sigh on the earth, "the gods punished me for my "vanity". It is only a matter of time."_

"The gods have no place in this time. I may worship whatever idols I wish." The glint of candlelight as it bounces off the turning spoon. The quirk of his lips stretches wider, but it is an ugly thing and skin threatens to tear past the raw silk of his cheek.

" _'Whatever idols I wish'? Do you think yourself a god, boy?" his laughter is the ripple of stream water over jagged rocks, "Even I was merely a demi-god. You are nothing but what I choose to make you. Even your own image has become my own – the white shine of my hair, the glassy green of my eyes."_

"And yet they pay me tribute. It is a pyre built in my honor and it is my name branded into their souls."

"_Mortals know not of the power they left in the past, but I am a testament to the fact that the gods still live on - not in corporeal bodies, but they are still strong. Ancient magics still electrify the air as it did in -."_

"You said yourself that you are but a demi-god. The only tales of Narcissus are of his death, of weakness. Even with so little history, your tale is never concrete – were you created to lure Persephone? Was your lover a nymph, a mortal or your twin? Were you a prince or a hunter? You are what mortals have made you Narcissus, you have given me nothing but a means to create my own epic history. They will see your face, but sing my name and when they erect statues to celebrate me, no "god" will dare strike out in anger."

"_You are foolish, boy. A few followers sitting at your feet have fed your ego to such a size that I can hardly fit in here anymore."_

"And you are a handful of words trapped in a boy's body. If you are unhappy with the accommodations then I pray you take leave."

Their conversation comes to an uncomfortable halt. The record skips and _Narcissus watches in discomfort _as the boy traces the carved stone of his jaw, staring intently at his reflection.The hand trails to slide across the alabaster plain of his neck, tiny hairs blooming under his fingertips.

"_To fall in love with one's image is forbidden. Pride has brought the fall of great kingdoms; a boy hardly past his sixteenth summer will fare no better."_

The boy hears none of this; he is enraptured by the lunula scar on his collarbone, where an arrow had nicked the flesh centuries before his birth. "You were beautiful," he mutters in a voice strained with respect and an emotion he is unfamiliar with, but understands intimately – the way a chisel knows the cold touch of marble.

_Narcissus too stares at the scar, feels the whisper of flesh on his own flesh and the racing of blood quickening in his veins. He is a proud man and has felt the sick lurch of the soul melting from the body, but the boy's gentle fingers tease arrogance into the space reason fled from. "I am beautiful," he sneers, but it is softened by the longing in his eyes "you are admiring my portrait." _


	6. VI

There is an Echo: it is forbidden to fall in love with one's reflection.

She is an ugly thing: wire-thin and her freckles sit uncomfortably on her face. She sits on the floor with the others and her dress rides up rudely on her thighs, revealing browning skin. The skin is stretched entirely too tightly over her skeleton and he can hear the wet slide of it tightening over bone as she rises. It is sickening and too easy _were you a prince or a hunter?the boy had snarled and he replied with that careless flourish of his hand a hunter, a hunter _to get her into his bed, but she had never felt the keen pinch of desire, much less engendered that feeling in another, so he thought little of it.

He is rough and quick and savage as he takes from her, buries himself deeply between her thighs, leather curling under a hot sun until it is curled: brown and thin. When she speaks it is light and supple _Narcissus's honeysuckle voice _and he kisses her words away, but it is more teeth _smooth, polished stone stolen away and all that is left are the crumbling rocky remnants_ than lips and soon her lips are chapped and bleeding. He forces her eyes to stay open and watches as his own face twists in a pleasure that charms his blood _you were but a demi-god _to the golden ichor of the gods.

He whispers in her ear: tales of suicide and burial, of a goddess birthed from the splitting of a skull, of Plato and Homer and how they got it all so terribly, terribly wrong. Finally: he tells her of a man in love with his own reflection, of a man withering away from starvation and thirst and a desperate need to know himself; her voice begins to echo his own and when he looks down at her she is a clean, buffed surface. The face he sees peering back at him is his own. He smiles: grotesque and toothy and on the skin of his lips is a history that is not his own, but is. When it is finished, they both call out his name; somewhere lightening is shattering the sky and it falls to _in his place sprung a flower, white and pure and simple in it's beauty – the prophets opened their mouths, silent and full, - they named it Narcissus_ pieces to the ground.

Now his image is not buried on the thin, white skin of her eyes, but claiming every inch of her face and he begs her to stay. As he strokes his own flaxen hair and touches his pale lips, the chlorophyll just below the transparent surface, she speaks _not honeysuckle, but jasmine and the heady scent of dew _with a hushed urgency.

Moss green eyes and hands not yet calloused by the hot wood of an arrow. She _he they_ speak "_it is forbidden to love your own reflection _for it is an insult to the gods. When Echo was spurned, she _vanished from grief and with her last breath she repeated _his words. Nemesis took pity on her – the gods are as in love with a tragedy as they are with love, maybe more so – _and cursed me to fall for my own reflection _shining back from the home of his father.

The boy is on his feet before the freckles return to her face, "wrong history."


	7. VII

It is raining when he opens the window. He looks up and the space above him is an angry expanse: barren and stilted. A flash of lightening ghosts his peripheral vision and he watches as, on the grass below him, the light bounces back violently and is flung off, strings of color returning to the sky at a dizzying speed.

Outside: the grass is lush and wet; he sinks down to his shins in the mud, and the heavy hand of the universe _once, centuries ago, a man named Narcissus knelt in the grass by the bed of a river _is pushing down on him with a fierceness that forces the breath from his lungs. It floats into the vacant space above his head in soft, white petals and he frees his legs from the soil.

Against the tree, stark and pathetic as its exterior had been stripped away and sat on the ground in a sludge of mud and ash, a shard of what had once been the sky is upright and swaying dangerously from the wind. He walks over to steady it, his hand uncurling like the blooming petals of a _Narcissus_ and he sets his hand of the wet-slick surface_. _It is quick, the muted click of a reset bone, and the storm halts. His reflection is wet and there is a grass stain on the knee of his left _right _pant leg. He has grown to accommodate the man beneath his skin, but if one were to look closely they would see the outline of another ankle right above the boy's own. He is staring, but for how long he can not determine: the sun and moon have fallen with the rest of the sky and are lying at the bottom of his pool and this makes telling the hours from morning to midnight impossible.

Now: _Narcissus _is urging him to take some kind of action, _the man growing antsy from decades upon decades of sitting motionless by a riverbed. _The boy begins as he always has: his hand reaching out to touch where his hair is mirrored back, gasping when it is not stopped by the glassy surface, but rather becomes entangled in the rain slicked strands. He takes a step closer to the sky-shard and shutters when his reflection mimics the action, the tips of their shoes brushing against each other before the boy takes a harried, timid step back.

"Peculiar," he states, his voice clinical as his reflection takes a step toward him, the shard breaking apart under the stress of an emerging body, "it is Zeus who has dominion over the skies, correct Narcissus?" He is whispering now, from fear or excitement he does not know, but _Narcissus is strangely silent other than a chuckle and a quirk of cupid-bow lips. _His tongue is immense in his mouth and he opens it to pant lightly when his reflection's hand delivers a fleeting stroke to the boy's cheekbones – the same ones the boy is staring at on the man across from him – before returning to brush a chunk of _flaxen hair _behind the boy's ear. His eyes shut for a moment as his reflection leans forward, it's flushed face

_so like his own with their high, high cheekbones and the curve of his lips and the thin lines below their eyes that gather ancient dust and spice before time kisses them away whispering, whispering_

coming closer until their noses are pressed against each other so harshly that there is a slight pain, but the boy knows of pain, of pressure, so he is quiet. It bites his lip and the boy's eyes snap open, _moss green eyes_ growing murky as his pupil grows large and dark like fat, black coal. They are nearly symmetrical: nose to nose, toe to toe and the space between them catches the whimpers of the boy and _Narcissus stretching, cat-like and sleek in the dying rays of the afternoon sun _and his reflection chanting, reciting the epics in a language that the boy does not understand, but knows, in the very meat of him. The only difference between them is a slight crack, like the thin strands of a spider's web, on the reflection's cheek, where a piece of the shard had cracked during it's descent to earth.

He smells of jasmine and hyacinth and green leaves budding on the shaking branches of trees. When his reflection presses his lips, plump with green blood and swirling traces of gold, against the boy's, he tastes of the water-worn stones lying at the bottom of a pond and the rippling image of the moon glowing in a pond and the poisonous bulbs of –

"_The fools," Narcissus crowed, "used it medicinally, to treat the sick and hysterical!"_

a hand on the back of his head and the lips are hard, hard, _hard_ _on his own _

It is not so much a kiss as a meeting of skin, the boy leaning in fervently, eyes open and gaping as he stares at his own face, calls out his own name into the sky

"_Say it!" Narcissus is screaming now and the boy is screaming and the sky would be crashing down on them again, again if it weren't for the fact that it was already cracked and crushed beneath their feet, "say it!"_

as it leads the boy back and pushes him flush against the tree, enveloping him and biting down on the scar on his collarbone.

His mother is laying in the grass and he draws the blood from her wound, small and pulsing and red. It stains the grass and the next day he throws her with the other beast on the pyre.

Lightening is crashing above their heads and illuminates the darkness of his backyard and a girl, old-young and very ugly, is crying. Her mouth is wide and complete and when she bellows at him it is the sudden booming of thunder. "It is forbidden," she says and he is sinking further and further into the mud, nearly knee deep in it now, "for to love one's own reflection is to insult the gods, child." She is writing in the muck now, crude symbols in _Latin or Greek or maybe English – maybe. _She is nude and there is mud streaking the flat surface of her stomach, her fingers scratching _his _name across her budding breasts. Her lips are chapped and breaking, brown-blue water pouring out and making trails down her neck until it is obscuring _his name. _

His reflection is smirking against his neck now and it bites down hard, tearing the boy's shirt from him with a clean tear,

_he has burned his imagine into their eyes and they are bowing at his feet like animals as Narcissus begs him to kiss them again, begs him "kiss them until their lips are broken and bleeding that red that the mortals favor so"_

but now his skin is rubbing harshly against the too smooth surface of the tree and he is crying out in pain or pleasure or some sick combination of the two. He can't tear his eyes away from his reflection though, can't help arching into it whenever it returns his calls in that _voice._ From the corner of his eye he can see the grass is stained with red and when he calls out to _Narcissus he can not feel the man, the body being folded and compressed so tightly into his own that one would never know, unless they looked down at his ankles, of course._

Lightening crashes again and his reflection is screaming in a primal, naked language that is older than time

slowly the lines on his face deepen.

He is screaming and the girl is screaming and the blood on the grass is stained red, red.

The prophets open their mouths wide and empty and massive like a gash in the earth _and somewhere a nymph had lain with a river god, not from love, but necessity – the gods would never allow a mortal such perfect misery. _

He is being torn asunder, but as he gazes at his own reflection he can do nothing but arch into the touch and stare up at his own moss green eyes and high, high cheekbones and sigh against the pale column of his own neck, the scar brushing against his lips.

_His history is his curse. He sat by the edge of the river, desperate, oh so desperate to embrace the man below him until he withered away from thirst and hunger and a longing for something unattainable. From the ground where he sat in his distress sprung a flower of plain white, pure and simplistic in its natural beauty._

It is forbidden to worship one's own reflection and to do so is to insult the gods. Where the boy had stood the earth is charred and barren.


End file.
